Just off the top of my head, the past year has brought us Hulk/Wolverine: 6 Hours, Wolverine: Snikt!, Wolverine: XIsle, Spider-Man/Wolverine, X2 Movie Prequel: Wolverine and Wolverine: The End, and just ahead is Wolverine/Punisher. And as I begin to write my review of the first issue of Wolverine/Captain America, one thought comes to mind...
Enough with the Wolverine mini-series, already!
It's not the abundance of these projects that irks me so much, but the fact that little of this field of comics isn't all that good. I would imagine they're profitable, but I don't see why readers keep coming back to these books, none of which say anything new about the common title character. Wolverine: The Origin I understood... it humanized the character while finally lifting a part of the veil of mystery that surrounds him. To be fair, writer R.A. Jones delivers a perfectly competent, by-the-numbers super-hero story here, and it would serve as an excellent introduction to the two title characters for new, younger readers.
A Shi'Ar computer chip at the X-Mansion seems to have followed the lead of its owners, the X-Men, in that it has begun to mutate. Mutation in advanced, exterrestrial technology means one thing, and that's power, but when it's sent to Avengers Mansion for more testing, it's intercepted en route by the wrong kind of people. While Forge, an X-Men ally, recruits the assistance of Captain America and a fellow Avenger, Wolverine uses his mutant abilities to track down the thieves. Unbeknownst to him, though, those responsible are no ordinary mercenaries.
It looks as though Marvel tried out the digital inking approach again on this title. There's an airy, almost ghostly look to the conventional super-hero genre linework of Tom Derenick here, not unlike what we see on early issues of Salvador Larocca's X-Treme X-Men. The method doesn't really work here because what's called for is a harder, darker and grittier look in the art. Instead, there's a lighter, dream-like look that dominates. Derenick tells the story clearly, but little about the linework really grabs me. The new villains -- the Contingency -- are completely generic. They're visually uninteresting; mind you, that matches the same quality granted them by the script.
Jones offers up a thoroughly accessible script, clearly delineating who all of the major players are. Furthermore, setting up Warbird as a common denominator shared by the two radically different title characters was a smart move as well. The plot is as generic as the new characters are, and the same can be said of the script. Such a run-of-the-mill story isn't nearly enough to hold my attention, but younger readers who can recognize the difference between real violence and comics violence might enjoy it.
